


like a water drop (ripple out in waves)

by neocxxlture



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Character Death, M/M, Mystery!, Space AU, Theme Day: Aliens, dread and longing in equal measure, for NCT Spookfest 2019, mild psychological horror, some gore, yuil mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2020-11-24 14:35:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20909249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neocxxlture/pseuds/neocxxlture
Summary: The Observer – the ship they’ve set out here to find, detoured off course for it – is only a speck of dark against the stark orange of the planet around which it orbits.“I’ve been trying to contact them for the past half an hour,” Taeyong says, “All attempts were unsuccessful.”Doyoung keeps watching the black dot, an uneasy feeling settling in the pit of his stomach.





	like a water drop (ripple out in waves)

**Author's Note:**

> happy halloween!!!!!

🛰

Doyoung opens his eyes to a sharp, short beep of the intercom mounted on the wall right next to the doors. It is an annoying and shrill sound that startles Doyoung awake with a jolt, before Taeyong’s voice comes through, static and muffled but still clear, “We’ve got visual on the Observer. Come to the bridge.”

Doyoung sits up in his bed, blinking sleep out of his eyes. He rakes a hand through his messy hair and tries to wake up at once, shift into ready mode. A quick glance at the clock on his bedside table betrays that it’s still night – as much of a night as there can be in the wide open of space, anyhow – and with a groan, he pushes himself to his feet.

A long, sleek corridor takes him to the other end of the spacecraft. He finds Taeyong there, sitting in the captain’s chair, and just one look at his face is enough for Doyoung to know that he has not slept a single minute since he last saw him.

The others shuffle into the room one by one out of the hallway, Yuta first, then Sicheng, and finally Jaehyun. They each take their chair, push a couple of buttons on the screens in front of them, and at last Doyoung looks out of the wide window that spans across the entire front of the ship.

The Observer – the ship they’ve set out here to find, detoured off course for it – is only a speck of dark against the stark orange of the planet around which it orbits.

“I’ve been trying to contact them for the past half an hour,” Taeyong says, “All attempts were unsuccessful.”

Doyoung keeps watching the black dot, an uneasy feeling settling in the pit of his stomach.

The Observer is a ship just like their own. As the name suggests, it was sent out here to _observe_, the object of its research the orange giant right next to it. Taeyong and his team were sent out similarly on their very own Researcher, supposed to do research on their own planet that’s been assigned to them.

A week ago, their radars picked up on a faint emergency signal. Yuta managed to lock onto it and through their equipment enhance it and find out that it was the other team – the Observer team – that sent out the SOS. Under Taeyong’s orders they veered off course in the direction of the ship in peril, and it’s taken them a week to get there even going at full speed and power.

“Jaehyun, do a bio scan,” Taeyong orders now, and Jaehyun immediately starts pushing buttons on his screen.

A few minutes pass, a silence that feels deafening and overpowering to Doyoung’s ears. “There’s nothing.”

“Weird,” Sicheng voices Doyoung’s own sentiment out loud.

It _is_ weird, no matter how he looks at it. The Station never reported that anything would have happened to the Observer, meaning the Observer never reported anything unusual happening to the Station. Doyoung wonders how that’s possible, how come that they didn’t contact the headquarters first. He thinks of the five-man team aboard the Observer; what could have happened to them that the only course of action they could have taken was to send out an emergency signal into the wide open of space and hope for rescue?

They are only a few minutes away from the ship - now clearly visible, and all of it seems intact, no damage to the outside to be seen at all - when they receive a transmission.

“There’s something coming in,” Doyoung tells the room, eyeing his own screen where a window pops up. With a flick of his wrist he sends it to Taeyong’s screen, and Taeyong allows the transmission to come through.

Noise comes out of the speakers then. It is dissonant, harsh, jarring. It takes Doyoung a second to figure out what seems so strange about it: it’s a voice, but it’s not just one - it sounds like a mixture of different voices, all speaking at once, all saying the same thing over and over, speaking over one another. It repeats a few times, unintelligible, before it cuts off.

All the hairs on Doyoung’s body stand on end. Amid the cacophony, he could make out Taeil’s voice.

“The hell?” Sicheng asks in his low tone, and when Doyoung looks at him he finds his face pale and stricken with something Doyoung can only describe as a touch of fear.

“Did you hear that?” Jaehyun asks, sounding like there’s something lodged right inside his throat, “I mean, Mark’s voice?”

Taeyong slowly turns his head to look at Jaehyun. “Mark’s voice?”

Jaehyun shakes his head, suddenly unsure, “I thought I heard him.”

Doyoung meets gazes with Sicheng, and a shiver runs down his spine. Sicheng’s face is like an open book, easy to read – and Doyoung is suddenly sure that Sicheng’s heard a completely different voice in the mix of it as well, just as Doyoung did, just as he’s willing to bet Taeyong and Yuta did, too.

The spaceship comes to a slow, languid stop in front of the Observer, only a few meters apart.

They sit in silence for a while.

It is Taeyong that breaks that quiet, with a low, “Prepare for docking.”

Doyoung faintly feels like they shouldn’t do this, but he obeys the order.

The docking takes about fifteen minutes. It’s a procedure they know by heart, getting the ship in position and beginning the descend and locking sequence.

It’s Yuta that asks the question that’s undoubtedly been on everyone’s minds in the past couple of minutes, or even days, “What do you think happened to them?”

Neither of them has an answer for him.

The shuttle shakes with the mechanisms as they lock into place, click after click. Only when everything settles and a beep sounds from a speaker does Jaehyun confirm that they’ve been successful in connecting their ship to the Observer.

Doyoung puts his protective suit on with heavy limbs. He’s been sending out transmission requests for the entire time since they’d received the other one until now, and not one of them got through. He cannot help but wonder why no one’s picking up, when they clearly sent out a message of their own. Where are they? Just what is going on?

They all walk into the room that connects the ship to the Observer in a line. The first doors of the room shut tight after them and the cabin depressurizes. Taeyong stops in front of the hull doors that lead into the other shuttle, and tells his crew, “Prepare for the worst. Do not stray off. We have to stick together.” He looks at each of their faces in turn. Doyoung is the last person Taeyong’s eyes land at, and they linger for a second too long before he drags his gaze away.

Yuta pushes a button on a control panel next to the round doors, and with a soft whooshing sound they slowly come open. The five of them go through the threshold one after the other, with Taeyong up front, and Doyoung taking up the rear.

There is not much variation to the Observer from the Researcher. The room leads them to a hallway through another door, and the hallway leads them to the backroom, which takes them by another hallway to the bridge, from which they get to the Central – or leisure, as they like to call it – room.

There is silence and darkness inside the ship, both heavy, almost oppressive. Taeyong cautions to keep their helmets on as soon as they confirm that there is no oxygen inside, and then he cautiously calls out into the darkness. No response. As they walk forward, their flashlights glide over smooth, familiar walls and all sorts of equipment that looks like it’s not been used in a while.

At the bridge, Taeyong approaches the captain’s chair, trying to bring the main screen in front of it to life. It takes a minute, but in the end, it lights up, and with the other lights follow, coming alive like a wave spilling from the center of the room to the outside. Doyoung feels the vibrations in the ground when the core of the ship powers on, shaking the entire structure as it does.

They take a quick look at the screens, trying to learn as much as they can before they continue to search the rest of the ship. Yuta calls from the other side of the room where he’s leaned over a control panel, “The ship’s busted. It reports several errors in three of the four engine rooms, and the core is too weak to manage much more than the lights for half an hour, tops,” he says, and then adds, “I think they got stranded here.”

Taeyong asks, “What went wrong?”

Yuta answers with uncertainty lacing his tone, “I have no idea.”

Doyoung is looking over another screen looking for crew logs when Jaehyun’s voice comes from the hallway to the leisure room, strained, “Guys.”

They turn to him as one. It doesn’t take them long to notice what Jaehyun is staring at: now that the lights have come on, they can see that the ground in the room and a part of the wall inside the hallway is smeared with dried blood, like someone leaned against it with bloody hands. There are more traces of it around the room, too: on the chairs, the screens, the floor.

“Shit,” Sicheng breathes out.

“It leads to Central,” Jaehyun motions with his hand forwards, to the room at the end of the hallway.

“Alright,” Taeyong says, voice clear that none of this is alright, and Doyoung’s hands tighten into fists. “Let’s see what that is about. Be careful. Keep close.”

Doyoung’s hands clench and unclench, nervous. He realizes belatedly that they didn’t carry with them any weapons. Why would they, right? There wasn’t anyone here that would mean them harm, the crew were their colleagues, their friends. Doyoung looks around the room and he spots a toolbox hidden underneath a table. He quickly squats down and retrieves from it a wrench, before following behind Yuta’s retreating back down the hallway.

He drops the wrench to the ground as soon as he enters the room and gets a look at the scene that greets them there.

The blood smears lead into the room along the entirety of the hallway wall. Right there, in the middle of the room, half leaned over a couch and half slouched on the floor, is a body. Doyoung walks a step closer, not even aware he’s doing so, as the wrench clatters to the ground, the sound too loud in the dead silence of the room around him.

He looks closer and sees that the mound on the ground is too big, too bulky, too long to be just one person. He sees arms, legs, a head at the top, and then he sees the others. He counts them out, _one two three four five._

They’re all there. All in a big heap, tangled together, making it impossible to tell where one body begins and another ends, they are _there._

Doyoung is only distantly aware of the sounds of Yuta’s retching somewhere next to him, and the sound of Taeyong’s voice. He can’t understand the words. He is staring at the head, hair greasy and matted to the person’s forehead, his eyes closed.

Taeil looks peaceful like this. If Doyoung took the grime, the purple sheen to his skin and the blood on his body and his hands out of the equation, he almost looks like he is soundly asleep.

They’re dead, Doyoung realizes. They’re all dead.

“What the fuck happened here?” Yuta’s voice finally comes through, weak and scratched raw.

“Who’s the blood from?” Sicheng asks. Doyoung hates it, but he takes another step closer, and still it’s hard to make out the source of the bleeding, but in the end he manages. The front of Jungwoo’s shirt is a tattered mess; the skin underneath it, the better part of his stomach, looks like it’s been torn open.

“It’s Jungwoo’s,” he says weakly, feeling bile rise to the back of his throat.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Jaehyun says quietly, “Fuck.”

“Run diagnostics,” Taeyong orders in a quiet voice.

Jaehyun takes out a handheld device, and after a moment of silence says, staring at the screen, “They’ve been dead for weeks.”

“Christ,” Yuta says, looking like he’s about to throw up, “How…?” He doesn’t voice the question out, but he doesn’t need to.

“We need to look at the computers, find anything useful that can tell us what happened to them,” Taeyong says, and despite his calm tone Doyoung can tell that he’s just as freaked out as the rest of them. They happen to meet eyes once again, and Doyoung doesn’t know what to say, so he only looks at him.

Jaehyun leaves the room first, returning to the bridge. Sicheng quickly follows, and Taeyong lowers his voice to talk to Yuta.

What they say gets lost in the pounding of the blood in Doyoung’s temples. Doyoung is about to follow the others down the hallway as he throws one last look at the bodies in the center of the room. Then he freezes, stomach bottoming out.

Taeil’s eyes are open, staring at him. They are glazed over, like there’s fog just inside the eyeballs. Doyoung is frozen in place, afraid to breathe. He waits; but Taeil doesn’t move. Of course he doesn’t. He’s dead, isn’t he?

But his eyes weren’t open when he came into the room. Were they?

“Doyoung?” Comes Taeyong’s voice from the other room, echoing in the enclosed space. With an exhale, Doyoung tears his gaze away from Taeil’s lifeless eyes, and walks to the bridge.

“There are some files here, their research, mostly,” Sicheng says, swiping over on a screen, voice quiet and fingers trembling. “An entry a day for the past four years. That’s a lot to go over.”

“Download it all,” Taeyong tells him.

Doyoung returns to his abandoned screen, resuming his search for the crews logs or anything else. There are none.

It takes them a while to search the computers. Yuta, at some point, goes to stand in front of the window, looking out at the giant planet. Doyoung watches him for a while, the look of grief on Yuta’s face unmistakable, painful. Doyoung never pried much, but it was a well-known secret amongst their crews that Yuta and Taeil were in a relationship.

Doyoung looks at Taeyong, then. Taeyong’s beautiful face is set in hard, tense lines, eyes cold, but still bright, full of life. For a second he lets himself imagine them as lifeless as Taeil’s own, and a debilitating chill runs down his spine.

He turns his attention back to the computer with a jolt. This is not the time and place to ponder the mortality of the people one loves, he chastises himself. There are more pressing matters at hand.

“I got something,” Jaehyun speaks up, “It’s encrypted. I can’t decode it.”

“We’ll take it with us,” Taeyong says, then looks around the room. “Anything else?”

“I think that’s all,” Doyoung says.

“Hey,” Sicheng speaks up, “Where’s Yuta?”

Doyoung whirs to look towards the window, but he finds the spot Yuta occupied a few minutes before to be empty.

Doyoung’s feet get him up and moving back to Central before his brain can even catch up with his actions. He rushes through the bloodied hallway, the sounds of footsteps following closely behind. A horrifying, dreadful sense of foreboding settles in his skin.

They do find Yuta in the Central room, but the sight of him makes Doyoung’s blood turn to ice in his veins.

Yuta is kneeling by Taeil’s body, Yuta’s gloved hands gripping Taeil’s own bare, bloody ones. Yuta has angled Taeil’s body so that they’re looking at each other, Yuta’s eyes bloodshot and red and brimming with unshed tears, and Taeil’s empty and faded and dull.

“Yuta, hey,” Jaehyun slowly approaches him, voice going for soothing but unable to disguise the strained, shaky edge, “Look at me, buddy.”

Yuta, seemingly with great difficulty, turns to face Jaehyun. Jaehyun reaches his side and gently guides him to his feet, “I’m sorry. They’re gone. There is nothing more we can do for them now.”

The expression that Yuta faces Jaehyun with is absent, blank. It is eerie to see; it’s like he has turned into an empty shell in a matter of minutes. Then his brow twitches, like finally Jaehyun’s words register in his brain and he understands what he is saying.

“I-” Yuta begins to say but is cut off when all the lights suddenly go out around them, plunging them into darkness.

Doyoung fumbles for his flashlight. Taeyong and Jaehyun find theirs first, and soon their beams illuminate the space around them, blinding Doyoung for a second as Taeyong sweeps it around the entire room.

“And there goes the rest of the power,” he says, voice shaking only the tiniest bit, “Let’s get out of here.”

They walk back out, and through the bridge into the hallway that took them there, Taeyong in front, then Jaehyun, then Sicheng. Yuta walks in front of Doyoung, slower than the rest, like he’s in a daze. Doyoung cannot blame him.

When they near the entry point and the hatch closes after them, Doyoung is too distracted by peering into the darkness around them than to what’s in front of him, so when Yuta grabs him by the shoulders, he doesn’t have enough time to react. A startled cry escapes his mouth, just one distressed sound, because he doesn’t expect Yuta to heave him into the wall with all the power that he possesses.

The impact knocks the breath out of Doyoung’s lungs for a long, dizzying second. He thinks he hears footsteps, like someone’s running, but he can’t be sure – he is too preoccupied by the crack that forms in his visor. He puts his gloved palms to the glass, heart beating fast in his chest, chest heaving for oxygen that escapes through the crack.

Sicheng, Jaehyun and Taeyong come running in through the hull doors, illuminated by the circle of light coming out of Doyoung’s flashlight that he dropped to the ground. Sicheng sweeps his own light over them, over Doyoung leaning against the wall and gripping his helmet while he hacks out coughs, Yuta towering over him.

“What-” he tries to ask, and Doyoung tries to warn him, but Yuta is already moving towards Sicheng before the wheezed words can leave his mouth. “Look out!”

Sicheng manages to evade Yuta somehow, but he’s not able to get completely out of dodge. Yuta gets ahold of him and they struggle against each other, Sicheng grunting with the effort of trying to get Yuta off him, asking him, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Taeyong runs to Doyoung’s side and helps him to his feet. Doyoung tries to tell him, “My helmet,” but he cannot manage it. Taeyong, with Jaehyun’s help, gets Doyoung across the room and through the hull doors when Yuta suddenly exclaims, “Stop! Stop it!”

“_You_ stop this!” Sicheng screams back in his face.

Yuta listens, surprisingly. He lets Sicheng go – no, he pushes him away, strong enough that Sicheng stumbles a few steps back in order not to fall over, and Yuta says, face distorted in a wild grimace that has no place on his face, “Get out!”

Sicheng stands in place, confused, “Are you crazy?”

Yuta advances on him again, a dark shadow passing over his face, almost makes it seem like there is something black writhing under the skin, “Get out of here!”

He pushes Sicheng through the door, and before Doyoung or Sicheng or Taeyong or Jaehyun can understand what he’s doing, he manages to close the hatch. Only then do Doyoung’s senses return to him, looking through the window on the door at Yuta’s face. Jaehyun yells, “What are you doing?”

Sicheng and Taeyong both reach for the control panel on the wall, but Yuta is quicker. Doyoung watches, as dread settles in his stomach, how Yuta pushes a couple of buttons, and then meets Doyoung’s gaze as the ships disconnect.

“No!” Sicheng throws himself at the door, “No!”

They feel it when the cabin pressurizes – Doyoung feels it when he can finally breathe properly again – and he leans against the door, gasping for air, Taeyong’s arm still around his shoulders.

The disconnecting of locks on the hatch pushes the Researcher away, and slowly the ship glides away from the Observer, away from Yuta who keeps looking out of the tiny window right at Doyoung, looking like he’s sorry, before he closes his eyes and in one smooth motion pulls his helmet off.

Doyoung cannot look away, even though he feels sick to his stomach. Yuta’s hands reach for his throat out of reflex, and Doyoung can vividly imagine the agony he’s feeling, suffocating – and then Yuta collapses to the ground, and out of sight.

“Christ,” Taeyong says weakly. “What the hell just happened?”

Doyoung cannot answer. Neither of them can. What _did _just happen?

🛰

Doyoung can’t sleep.

If he closes his eyes, he sees it all - Taeil’s lifeless eyes, the bodies of his friends, Yuta’s soulless gaze – at the backs of his eyelids.

Doyoung doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to stop thinking about it.

🛰

He finds Taeyong at the bridge, sitting in front of the big window.

Doyoung’s not sure why he ventured out of his room to find Taeyong, but there is an itch under his skin that he cannot seem to scratch out.

Taeyong greets him gently, even though he’s unable to keep the exhausted tone out of his voice, “Hey.”

Doyoung joins him on the ground, sits close enough to him that their knees knock together, but he doesn’t care. He cannot stop thinking about Yuta, about Taeil, about Yuta and Taeil, their hands clasped together, Taeil’s eyes dead and empty.

They’ve flown away from the Observer, but they can still see it through the window, bathed in the orange giant’s bright light. When Doyoung can no longer bear to look at the ship, he instead turns his eyes to Taeyong.

Taeyong looks dead-tired, wrung out. Doyoung imagines he himself doesn’t look much better. Even like so, though, Taeyong is gorgeous.

Doyoung can’t stop his hand from reaching out. He clasps his fingers around Taeyong’s forearm, feeling the heat of his skin, the texture, the way the muscle gives way under his touch, making sure Taeyong is _there._ Taeyong turns a wide-eyed, surprised gaze on him, but Doyoung doesn’t have an answer for the question in his eyes, so he doesn’t say anything.

Doyoung always thought that he had enough time. Where was there to go or to hide, on a ship in the wide open of space?

His grip on Taeyong’s arm tightens. He was being foolish.

🛰

When he finally manages to fall asleep for the first time in days, he dreams of Taeyong. He dreams of Taeyong’s smooth skin, pretty lips, his gentle fingers in his hair. He dreams of Taeyong’s breath fanning over his cheek. He dreams of Taeyong holding him in his hold, saying: _let me in, Doyoung. Let me in._

🛰

It is quiet aboard the spacecraft, these days.

Doyoung guesses neither of them have quite processed what happened yet. How could they? He himself spends sleepless nights staring at the ceiling of his room or silently sitting by Taeyong’s side on the bridge in front of the window, looking out into space, still wondering about what happened, how it could come to pass. He still expects Yuta to come running onto the bridge with a grin on his face when he sleeps in in the morning, the way he used to, still expects to find him in the research station going over new data coming in from their planet, still expects to find him and Sicheng hanging out in Sicheng’s room; his heart sinks deeply into his stomach whenever he realizes that he won’t see him, not ever again.

They make a report to headquarters about the Observer, their crew and Yuta. Taeyong is the one to do it, because Taeyong is efficient and cold when he needs to be – that’s why he’s their captain – but Doyoung worries because Taeyong turns withdrawn and quiet and Doyoung doesn’t know how to reach out to him.

🛰

They return to the orbit of their own planet. Neither of them is eager to get back to work analyzing new data they receive from their explorers down below, but there isn’t anything else to do. They have to make up for the lack of Yuta’s expertise, divide roles anew, and just get through it like they would any other time.

The days go by, agonizingly slowly. Hour by hour, minute by minute,

second

by

second.

It is quiet aboard the ship, these days. It feels like something is bound to happen.

🛰

Doyoung walks down the hallway to the bridge.

He runs into Sicheng as he goes, but Sicheng spares him only the barest of glances, a shadow passing over his face as they pass each other before disappearing in the direction of their rooms.

Only Taeyong sits in his seat in front of a screen. Doyoung doesn’t know where Jaehyun is and doesn’t really bother enough to go find out. He sits down in his own seat, but he doesn’t turn his own screen on; instead, he observes Taeyong as Taeyong works, for whoever knows how long.

Noise comes from down the hallway – the sounds of footsteps, like someone is running, a few muffled grunts, and then several following thuds, like something hard has hit the floor in quick succession.

Taeyong is out of his seat faster than Doyoung, so Doyoung is the last person to arrive at the scene.

Taeyong is standing, frozen, in the middle of the hallway. A few feet before him, there is Jaehyun – kneeling on the floor, a scanning device in his hand. There are traces of blood on the metal, droplets on the ground in front of Jaehyun, and then, a couple of steps away, Sicheng’s body splayed out on the floor.

“I didn’t mean to,” Jaehyun says, and he sounds broken and far, far away, “He attacked me. I didn’t mean to.”

Taeyong manages to find his voice, but it’s barely a whisper, “He attacked you?”

The scanner slips from Jaehyun’s fingers to the floor with a clatter. He nods, but doesn’t say more.

🛰

There is a knock on Doyoung’s door. Just one, almost deafening in the silence around him. Doyoung doesn’t move, but then Taeyong’s voice carries over into the room, “It’s just me. Let me in, Doyoung, please.”

Doyoung hesitates only for a splinter of a second before he opens the door for him.

For the past few weeks, it has been Doyoung that searched for Taeyong – but now, for the first time, Taeyong is the one to come to him. Doyoung hates that it takes another tragedy for Taeyong to seek him out.

They sit side by side on Doyoung’s bed for what feels like a lifetime before Taeyong asks, voice small, “What is going on?”

Doyoung wishes he had an answer for him.

Instead, he asks in turn, “Where’s Jaehyun?”

“Sleeping,” Taeyong says. He brings a hand to his forehead, like his head hurts. Doyoung wonders how long it’s been since he got a proper night’s rest but has a feeling it’s been a while.

He says, “You should too.”

Taeyong lets out a bitter laugh and shakes his head. “I can’t. I can’t shake the feeling… that it’s not over yet, whatever this is,” he says, “Doyoung, I’m scared.”

“We’ll get through this,” Doyoung tells him, possibly lying through his teeth but needing to say the words nonetheless. He puts his arm around Taeyong’s shoulders, and Taeyong melts into his side, “We’ll figure it out.”

🛰

They manage to, finally, decode the encrypted file.

It seems like a log. There’s not much to it, only a few lines of text. It is impossible to tell who it’s from – there’s no digital signature. It reads:_ i feel it in my head. it’s just there, somehow. it wants the others. i don’t think i can stop it. i’m sorry._

Doyoung reads the words a few times over, and then once more. Ice takes root in his veins.

“Jaehyun,” Taeyong says, pressing a button on the screen so his voice can be heard over the intercom across the ship, and wherever Jaehyun might currently be hiding, “Come to the bridge, now.”

They wait for him, five minutes, ten, thirty. Doyoung knows it’s already too late by the time they get up to go search for him.

Taeyong takes hold of Doyoung’s hand as they walk down the hallway, maybe in search of comfort.

They find Jaehyun in his room, lying on his bed. His eyes closed, he seems to be fast asleep – but Doyoung’s seen this before, the unnaturally still posture, the purplish, almost dark sheen to his skin, like there’s something hiding just underneath the surface.

Taeyong checks Jaehyun’s pulse, and that is when Doyoung needs to back out of the room. Because their hands are still clasped tightly together, Taeyong follows. Doyoung leans with his entire body against the wall, and it feels like it’s the only thing keeping him on his shaking feet at this point.

“There’s something on this ship with us, isn’t there,” Doyoung croaks out, “It killed them, and now it’s killing off all of us, one by one.”

The log keeps repeating at the back of Doyoung’s mind, _i feel it in my head. it’s just there, somehow. it wants the others. _

They look at each other, and Doyoung knows they’re both thinking the same thing. Whatever this thing is, it is coming for them, and they cannot escape.

🛰

Doyoung floats in darkness, alone.

There is nothing, for a moment. Then he opens his eyes, and there is light.

There is orange all around him, swallowing, consuming. It is familiar – it is home. There is one, there are many; there is one.

But there is something else, close; and he is curious.

🛰

Doyoung and Taeyong sit on the floor in front of the window.

They huddle together, waiting for the end.

It’s hard to wait for something to happen, when you don’t know what it might be, or when it might come to pass.

He chances a look at Taeyong, and finds that he looks calm, almost serene. It provides startling contrast against Doyoung’s own feelings, which are an anxious, nervous mess. He wants to ask him whether he’s made peace with his fate, and how that is possible.

Taeyong’s eyes meet his, and they are impossibly dark.

He tries to withdraw, but Taeyong keeps his hold on him secure. His voice is gentle when he speaks, and it is Taeyong, but somehow Doyoung knows that he is not him at the same time, “Don’t be afraid.”

It is too late.

Despite everything, Doyoung relaxes. Taeyong holds onto him gently, and Doyoung’s body reacts on its own to his touch when Taeyong cups his cheek in his palm, and then hugs him close to his chest, “It’s okay, Doyoung.”

Doyoung closes his eyes, and surrounded by Taeyong’s embrace, he waits.

When the end comes, it hurts, but only for a while.

**Author's Note:**

> [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/neocxxlture)   
[twitter](https://twitter.com/kunyongx)


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